Page 9 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

corporation-dominated national and global economies in some ways
resemble more the mercantilist economy of the eighteenth century of
which Smith was sharply critical. This change therefore is a fundamental
one. It has thrown liberalism into a prolonged and irreversible crisis
of unreality – the first manifestation of which was the collapse of the
Liberal Party in Britain after World War I – from which it has never
recovered.
The rise of monopoly in the economy has been accompanied by the
emergence of large-scale organizations in other areas of society – in the
state, trade unions and political parties. These changes towards the joint-
stock company, trusts and cartels historically proceeded furthest in
Germany and the United States but were general to all the developed
capitalist economies. Today, monopoly probably has gone furthest in Japan,
with its incestuous concentration of huge banks, massive manufacturing
firms and vast marketing and distribution organizations which reach into
the smallest recesses of economic life through the practice of ‘relational
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contracting’. Efforts at what is called in Europe ‘competition policy’
(anti-trust in the United States, but with no equivalent for the keiretsu in
Japan) focus not on subordinating or breaking up large corporations but
on maintaining some semblance of monopolistic competition between
them. Yet the political consequences of this overwhelming power of
transnational corporations is nowhere anticipated in classical liberal polit-
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ical theory and is ineffectually captured by contemporary liberalism. This
failure leaves national and international democracy as a largely formal-
legal shell, substantively controlled by the power of large transnational
corporations, as books such as Monbiot’s make clear. 5
Various thinkers since the beginning of the twentieth century, often
from radically different viewpoints, made this collapse of liberalism and
the rise to dominance of large-scale organizations, the intellectual center of
their work. One only has to think of Carl Schmitt and Max Weber on the
one hand, and Hilferding and Lenin, on the other – significantly, early
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twentieth-century contemporaries of each other. From the point of view of
this book, it matters little whether one understands this real transforma-
tion of the liberal economy from a Schmittian (reactionary), Weberian (lib-
eral) or Leninist (Marxist) position. I am not here concerned with whether
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one perceives the process as the inescapability of ‘decisionism’, the inex-
orable rise of the ‘iron cage of bureaucracy’ (like Weber), as the growth of
‘corporate globalization’, or as the rise of ‘monopoly capital’ and the dom-
inance of ‘finance capital’ (Hilferding, Lenin), although these distinctions
are clearly crucial. For my purposes, these are secondary issues. Only three
issues are of concern in this work: the first concern is the recognition of

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